The UN apologized on Thursday for the ovation given to a militant Serb nationalist song performed at a concert honoring Serbia’s presidency of the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, said.
Nesirky said that “the United Nations was aware that some people were offended by the song March to the Drina, sung in the General Assembly hall on Monday night.”
Ban afterward stood at the podium alongside Vuk Jeremic, the former Serbian foreign minister and current assembly president, for a photograph with the performers, the Belgrade vocal group Viva Vox.
Ban “expressed sincere regret that people were offended by this song,” Nesirky said, adding that the UN secretary-general “obviously was not aware what the song was about or the use that has been made of it in the past.”
March to the Drina was originally written as a nationalist hymn after World War I, about a battle on the Drina River that now separates Serbia and Bosnia. It features lyrics such as “The battle was fought, Near cold water, Blood was flowing, Blood was streaming by the Drina ... for Freedom!”
It became a favorite of Serb nationalists, and was banned by Yugoslavia’s Communist government after World War II. It was reportedly sung in the 1990s during Serb attacks on Bosnian towns along the Drina River.
After the Yugoslav wars of secession, Serbs voted in 1992 to make it their national anthem. Serbia’s parliament bypassed it as being too provocative and adopted an old song from the country’s royalist period instead.
March on the Drina was added to the UN concert as an encore, and delighted the crowd, which was mostly unaware of its connotations.
Jeremic released a statement later on Thursday saying “some outrageous claims have been put forward.”
“With solemn respect for all the victims of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, these malicious misinterpretations of the song performed as an encore ... focus on its alleged misuses during the tragic conflicts. They represent regrettable attempts at twisting the meaning of our musical gift offered to the world last Monday and are deeply offensive to the Serbian people,” Jeremic said.
Meanwhile, the Congress of North American Bosniaks said: “The concert is a scandalous insult to the victims of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina because the orchestra played the infamous and offensive Serb nationalist song March on the River Drina.”
It called on the UN to “remove Vuk Jeremic from his position as the president of the 67th session of the UN General Assembly.”
REBUILDING: A researcher said that it might seem counterintuitive to start talking about reconstruction amid the war with Russia, but it is ‘actually an urgent priority’ Italy is hosting the fourth annual conference on rebuilding Ukraine even as Russia escalates its war, inviting political and business leaders to Rome to promote public-private partnerships on defense, mining, energy and other projects as uncertainty grows about the US’ commitment to Kyiv’s defense. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy were opening the meeting yesterday, which gets under way as Russia accelerated its aerial and ground attacks against Ukraine with another night of pounding missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. Italian organizers said that 100 official delegations were attending, as were 40 international organizations and development banks. There are
The tale of a middle-aged Chinese man, or “uncle,” who disguised himself as a woman to secretly film and share videos of his hookups with more than 1,000 men shook China’s social media, spurring fears for public health, privacy and marital fidelity. The hashtag “red uncle” was the top trending item on China’s popular microblog Sina Weibo yesterday, drawing at least 200 million views as users expressed incredulity and shock. The online posts told of how the man in the eastern city of Nanjing had lured 1,691 heterosexual men into sexual encounters at his home that he then recorded and distributed online. The
TARIFF ACTION: The US embassy said that the ‘political persecution’ against former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro disrespects the democratic traditions of the nation The US and Brazil on Wednesday escalated their row over US President Donald Trump’s support for former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, with Washington slapping a 50 percent tariff on one of its main steel suppliers. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva threatened to reciprocate. Trump has criticized the prosecution of Bolsonaro, who is on trial for allegedly plotting to cling on to power after losing 2022 elections to Lula. Brasilia on Wednesday summoned Washington’s top envoy to the country to explain an embassy statement describing Bolsonaro as a victim of “political persecution” — echoing Trump’s description of the treatment of Bolsonaro as
CEREMONY EXPECTED: Abdullah Ocalan said he believes in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons, and called on the group to put that into practice The jailed leader of a Kurdish militant group yesterday renewed a call for his fighters to lay down their arms, days before a symbolic disarmament ceremony is expected to take place as a first concrete step in a peace process with the Turkish state. In a seven-minute video message broadcast on pro-Kurdish Medya Haber’s YouTube channel, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said that the peace initiative had reached a stage that required practical steps. “It should be considered natural for you to publicly ensure the disarmament of the relevant groups in a way that addresses the expectations
RSS